Siebel Marketing User Guide > Planning and Designing Marketing Campaigns > Program and Campaign Planning Tools >

Creating and Using Activity Plans

Siebel Marketing's Activity Plans views allow you to associate predefined planning and milestone activities and tasks with a template (activity plan). Then, you can assign the templates to your marketing programs and campaigns. This assignment creates one or more activities that are associated with a campaign or a program.

NOTE:  Activities are not created for contacts loaded into a campaign.

Activity Plans may be designed to help you plan the marketing program or campaign, or launch it. Before you link an activity plan to your campaign, you need to create activity templates or customize existing templates to reflect your business process and needs. Templates allow you to define a generic set of activities that may be reused.

For example, a marketing department production manager might design an activity plan template called Direct Mail that contains regularly scheduled campaign activities such as meetings with creative or budgetary staff and start tasks. Using the Campaign Activity Plans view the manager can associate the activity plan template to the current campaign and then assign resources, define priorities and status and so on to each predefined task, adding comments where necessary.

The activity plan record is flagged to indicate how the activity plan will be used. If the activity is designated as a planning task, none of its activities are copied to the campaign record when it is created. If the activity plan is designed for the execution of the program or campaign, select the Recurring check box, and the set of activities will be automatically recreated and associated with each occurrence.

If your marketing program or campaign has a mixture of planning and start activities, create two plans, one for planning and one for execution tasks, and assign them both to the program or campaign.

Creating Activity Templates

Activity Plan Templates allow you to create and manage activities for programs and campaigns. You define templates using the Application Administration screen's Activity Templates and Activity Template Details views.

A campaign's activity plan template might include information on the type of activity, duration and status, a list of activities associated with the program or campaign (preparation, telephone calls, milestones, tasks), and so on.

To create an activity plan template

1. Navigate to the Administration - Data screen > Activity Templates view.
2. In the Activity Plan Templates list, create a new record.
3. In the Template form, complete the fields and save the record.
   1. Type a name for the template.
   2. In the Type drop-down list, choose Program Container for a marketing program template, and Campaign as an activity template for campaigns.
   3. Type a template description.
   4. In the Auto Trigger field, select the check box if the activity should be associated with the occurrence level.
   5. Select the Public check box if the activity plan may be used by others not on your team.

To create activities for the template

1. Navigate to the Administration - Data screen > Activity Templates view.
2. In the Activity Plan Templates list, select a template.
3. Click the Activity Template Details view tab.
4. In the Activity Template Details list, create a new record.
5. Complete the necessary fields for each activity assigned to the template.
6. From the Type drop-down list, choose an activity type.

   NOTE:  Repeat Step 2 through Step 6 to add activities to the template.

7. Save the activity.

Associating Activity Plans with Programs and Campaigns

Use the Campaigns or Programs screen's Activity Plans view to associate a template containing predefined activities with a program or campaign. An Activity Plan Template's type must be set to Program Container for marketing programs and Campaign for marketing campaigns to be available for selection.

The Activity Plans view consists of the following elements:

• The Campaign or Program form, which provides details of the selected campaign or program.
• The Templates list, which can contain one or many activity plan templates.
• The Activities list, which displays activities associated with the selected template.

To associate an activity plan and activities with a campaign or program

1. Navigate to the Campaigns or Programs screen.
2. In the Campaigns or Programs list, drill down on the campaign name or program name.
3. Click the Plan view tab.
4. In the Plan link bar, click Activity Plans.
5. In the Activity Plans list, create a new record.

   In the new row, the Recurring field contains a check mark.

6. Complete the necessary fields.
   1. From the Template drop-down list, select a predefined template.
   2. Edit the existing description if desired, or type a description of the plan.
   3. Select Suppress Calendar to populate the check box if you do not want these activities added to your calendar view.
   4. Clear Recurring if the activity should be not be written to the campaign record for every occurrence of the campaign or program.

      When you clear the Recurring check box, you indicate that this set of planning tasks is only performed once across all occurrences. By default, each new activity plan is set to Recurring when you assign it to a campaign or activity.

      A list of all activities appear in the Activities list. Note that the dates are populated by using the Lead Time column relative to the time that the activity template was associated.

7. To change the times or dates of any of the activities, click the Schedule view tab for the campaign
8. In the Schedule link bar, click Activity List.